Global Thinkers Erica Chenoweth and David Scheffer debate when — if ever — social and political movements should turn to armed insurgency.

By Seyward DarbySeyward Darby is a story editor at Foreign Policy. She was previously an editor for the New Republic and Transitions Online , a Prague-based web magazine covering the former communist space. She has written for, among other publications, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New Civil Right Movement, and Balkan Insight, and she has also worked for Freedom House and Human Rights Watch. She has reported on diplomatic connections between Syrian rebels and Kosovo’s government, LGBT rights in Eastern Europe, and lackluster U.N. efforts to promote human rights in Burma. She holds a B.A. in English from Duke University and an M.A. in international relations with a concentration in human rights from Yale University, where she was a fellow with the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, researching South Africa’s failure to compensate generations of gold miners suffering from tuberculosis, silicosis, and other occupational diseases. A native of eastern North Carolina, her peculiar name comes from this book .

In this week’s Global Thinkerspodcast, David Scheffer, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, and political scientist Erica Chenoweth explore the merits and drawbacks of taking up weapons against an oppressive regime.

About the participants:

David Scheffer is a 2011 Global Thinker. He’s a professor and the director of the Center for International Human Rights at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; he’s also the U.N. secretary-general’s special expert on U.N. assistance to the Khmer Rouge trials. Previously, from 1997 to 2001, Scheffer served as the first ever U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes and led the U.S. delegation in talks to establish the International Criminal Court. He’s the author of All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals.

Erica Chenweoth is a 2013 Global Thinker. She’s a political scientist, professor, and associate dean for research at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School for International Studies. She has extensively researched political violence, and she has co-authored a book, Why Civil Resistance Works, showing that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent movements were two times more effective than their violent counterparts in effecting regime change, the expulsion of foreign occupation, or political succession. Follow her on Twitter: @ericachenoweth.